easily it is obtained;
nevertheless, the right of debt ought not to rest on a basis of
imagination; nor should the frame of a national currency vibrate with
every miser's panic, and every merchant's imprudence.

77. There are two methods of avoiding this insecurity, which would have
been fallen upon long ago, if, instead of calculating the conditions of
the supply of gold, men had only considered how the world might live and
manage its affairs without gold at all.[36] One is, to base the currency
on substances of truer intrinsic value; the other, to base it on
several substances instead of one. If I can only claim gold, the
discovery of a golden mountain starves me; but if I can claim bread, the
discovery of a continent of corn-fields need not trouble me. If,
however, I wish to exchange my bread for other things, a good harvest
will for the time limit my power in this respect; but if I can claim
either bread, iron, or silk at pleasure, the standard of value has three
feet instead of one, and will be proportionately firm. Thus, ultimately,
the steadiness of currency depends upon the breadth of its base; but the
difficulty of organization increasing with this breadth, the discovery
of the condition at once safest and most convenient[37] can only be by
long analysis, which must for the present be deferred. Gold or
silver[38] may always be retained in limited use, as a luxury of coinage
and questionless standard, of one weight and alloy among all nations,
varying only in the die. The purity of coinage, when metallic, is
closely indicative of the honesty of the system of revenue, and even of
the general dignity of the State.[39]

78. Whatever the article or articles may be which the national currency
promises to pay, a premium on that article indicates bankruptcy of the
government in that proportion, the division of its assets being
restrained only by the remaining confidence of the holders of notes in
the return of prosperity to the firm. Currencies of forced acceptance,
or of unlimited issue, are merely various modes of disguising taxation,
and delaying its pressure, until it is too late to interfere with the
cause of pressure. To do away with the possibility of such disguise
would have been among the first results of a true economical science,
had any such existed; but there have been too many motives for the
concealment, so long as it could by any artifices be maintained, to
permit hitherto even the founding of such a s